Pavel Tuzov

Extra Step

Last Friday my company held a Christmas and New Year’s party. I find it creative to celebrate it in March. Plus, you surely have much better options to find a nice place, then when competing with the entire Hamburg in December or even January.

And a nice place was chosen this year indeed – Hamburg’s popular destination — Miniatur Wunderland.

This enormous miniature world is full of minor [hidden] details and we had the opportunity to experience creating it. Well, it maybe sounds too cheesy. We just built (glued) miniature houses.

We’ve been divided into teams, each team received a couple of sets of things to build and limited amount of time. In the end, the results would be rated on quantitative and qualitative basis. My team won and I’ve learned an important lesson.

Our team itself divided into 3 pairs and each pair started to build a house. We had fun playing with it, made jokes, shared limited resources among us 6. All went very well. After more than an hour, when it was announced that only 15 minutes were left, we had 3 houses built. We also took the time and applied some creativity to the final results, going against the instructions (the thing that I like most in Miniatur Wunderland). I was satisfied with the result and was thinking to take a drink and relax in the next 15 minutes.

But I wasn’t given this chance.

A project manager was in our team. He made us work more. He insisted that together, in the remaining time, we manage to build another house. It seemed very unrealistic to me. But in 10 minutes we had a house. Sure, it wasn’t finished. Many small details were missing. But they were nice to have. The basis was built and if not for it, we would be out of competition in the quantitative part.

This extra step, which I had no motivation to do and even didn’t believe in, kept us in the game. On this very simple example I experienced the power of the extra effort.

Now as I think, I didn’t believe we will manage it, because I knew there was no time for a perfect result. But it didn’t have to be. This tendency for perfection often stops and limits you. You don’t have to make it perfect. Just make it better.